Pair of Aces: Rising Democratic Stars Julián and Joaquin Castro

Julián is the mayor of San Antonio; Joaquin is a newly elected U.S. congressman. Together, the Castro twins are a one-two punch.

At Rosario’s, Julián and Joaquin Castro’s favorite Tex-Mex restaurant in San Antonio, the host welcomes the mayor and the newly elected congressman effusively. “Which one is which?” he asks.

To say the Castro brothers get this a lot would qualify as an extreme understatement. Thirty-eight-year-old identical twins, they are indistinguishable to all but those closest to them. But there’s no visible annoyance. Julián, the mayor, flashes a mile-wide smile: “I’m the older one.”

Momentarily off-balance, but no less enthusiastic as he walks us to our table, the host says to both at once, “You’re going to be the first Hispanic president!”

This is a newer line for the brothers and has so far been directed primarily at Julián, who delivered a spectacular keynote address at the Democratic Convention. (Joaquin, in an identical blue suit, delivered the introduction, but the network anchors talked over him.) Frequently described as the Latino Obama, Julián served up what might have been the best jibe of the week in Charlotte, summarizing Mitt Romney’s advice to young people—that they start their first businesses by borrowing money from their parents—and then deadpanning, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”

The crack brought down the house. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart quipped, “Democrats have not only a rising Latino star in San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, they have an extra one of him in case he breaks.”

There’s significant truth in that joke. Once, in 2005, when he was running for mayor and had to be somewhere else, Julián sent Joaquin to take his place in a parade on San Antonio’s River Walk. Joaquin smiled and waved, and until the truth came out the next day, 200,000 people thought it was Julián. Over plates of enchiladas de mole and chicken Veracruz at Rosario’s, it becomes clear that not only do they not mind being confused, they actually cultivate their similarities. In conversation, one picks up seamlessly where the other leaves off. They part their black hair in the same place, cut it to the same length, and can’t vary in weight by more than a pound. Tonight Julián is wearing a long-sleeved button-down shirt, jeans, and running shoes. Joaquin is wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt, black jeans, and running shoes. On another evening when I met them for dinner in New York, Julián simply dittoed Joaquin’s order: lobster bisque and an iced tea.

It’s not that the Castro brothers are interchangeable: They have separate lives, interests, and careers in public service, with Julián serving in the executive branch, Joaquin as a legislator. But as a political phenomenon, they are a two-for-one package, halves of a joint enterprise focused on expanding the kind of educational opportunity that has enabled their own, mutual rise. They’re each other’s closest advisers, best friends, and top supporters. To call them an effective team would be another massive understatement. The Castro brothers are more like a single unit—with considerable charismatic force.

Expand

Photographed by Annie Leibovitz

“Their values are the same, their approach to politics is the same, and in a lot of ways they are more interchangeable than your average twins,” says Evan Smith, the editor in chief of the Austin-based Texas Tribune and a friend of both brothers for more than a decade. “What you see is not a rivalry so much as a mutual spurring-on.”

In early December, the brothers took me for a drive around San Antonio’s West Side—its working-class, Mexican-American core—to show me the houses and schools where they grew up. Away from the Alamo and the cypress-lined River Walk, this is a part of the city that tourists seldom visit: a flat, monotone landscape with horizontal expanses of ranch houses and bungalows punctuated by phantasmagoric street murals and electric-colored taquerias.

Childhood sites were very much on the mind of Julián, who recently began working on a memoir that Little, Brown plans to publish next year. He’s leaning over from the backseat, pointing out the modest, tidy white house with green trim at 814 Plainview, where he and Joaquin were born, and then the site where their more dilapidated second house once stood, at 3419 Weir Avenue, among a scattering of trailers behind a chain-link fence. This was where the Castros lived from age eight, after their dad—a math teacher named Jesse Guzman—moved out. Joaquin, at the wheel of the Chevy Malibu, points to the vacant lot where they played football, measuring exactly 47 yards in length, and a trailer that belonged to a “weird guy with terrifying dogs.”

Next, we drive by a purple-painted house at 1922 Hidalgo Street, where they lived in the mid-1980s, from ages nine to twelve. There’s a large middle school a block away, but they didn’t attend, Julián explains. When their mother, Rosie, a political activist, took them on the first day, the principal warned that half of the class wouldn’t make it through eighth grade. Appalled by his fatalism, Rosie moved them to Tafolla, a magnet school and the next stop on our tour. There they asserted their independence by taking exotic languages—Japanese for Julián, German for Joaquin. The twins rode the bus everywhere until finally, when they were thirteen, Rosie was earning enough running a voting-rights program at St. Mary’s University to buy the family’s first car. She also moved them to yet another house, the final one on our tour, 143 Globe, on a tidier, more suburban street.

This sprawling barrio plays backdrop to two parallel narratives. The first is the classic immigrant story that Julián emphasized in his convention speech—about their grandmother Victoria Castro, who came from Mexico as an orphaned young girl in 1922, never made it past the fourth grade, but taught herself to read and write in Spanish and English. She worked as a maid, cook, and baby-sitter so that her daughter, Rosie, could go to college. Her menudo (tripe stew) won $300 in a cook-off, which she used to pay the hospital bill when her grandsons were born—later living with and helping raise the boys after their unmarried parents separated. She sometimes even shared their bedroom.

The second narrative, which Julián emphasized less in his speech, was about their mother and the civil-rights struggle in San Antonio. In the sixties, the city was still controlled by an Anglo elite that oversaw the distribution of resources and appointed only a handful of token minorities. Rosie Castro was one of the Chicano activists who formed La Raza Unida, a third party that challenged this Democratic power structure. In 1971, at 23, she ran with three other anti-establishment candidates for city council. They lost, but the campaign paved the way for subsequent victories, including the 1981 election of Henry Cisneros as the city’s first Hispanic mayor.

The twins grew up in this milieu; Rosie took her boys in strollers to rallies for farmworkers and to speeches and receptions for Latino candidates. Though Julián vowed not to go into politics, telling his mother, “I don’t want to be poor,” he eventually felt the same pull she did toward community service and the cause of Latino empowerment. Later, she would be the chief strategist in both her boys’ earliest political campaigns. When Julián took over city hall after his 2009 election as mayor, the first thing he put up in his new office was a 1971 La Raza Unida poster with a picture of his mother. At the time of his Democratic Convention speech, the right-wing website breitbart.com cited this as evidence of the Castro family’s intergenerational “anti-gringo” bias.

Asked about how they’re different, the brothers struggle for a meaningful answer. They attended all the same schools, including Stanford and Harvard Law—but they have different tastes in reading, Joaquin preferring literary journalism and essays, Julián sticking with political biographies and history. They’ve had different political experiences, Joaquin serving in the Texas legislature and having to deal with a Republican majority, Julián holding an executive job in a town where members of his own party control the city council. Joaquin says being in the minority and facing constant opposition contributes to his tendency to get frustrated more easily—a way in which he is more like their mother. Julián is calmer, like their father, who has remained a presence in his sons’ lives.

In fact, the only reliable way to tell which Castro you’re speaking to is by checking for a wedding ring: Julián is married; his wife, Erica, teaches in a public school, and they have a three-year-old daughter, Carina Victoria, named for his grandmother. He’s eager for his one-minute-younger brother to catch up. “I’m really looking forward to Joaquin getting married, when he has kids,” he says. “I see my daughter as an only child. Our experience was growing up together, and she seems sometimes so lonely to me.”

For the past two years, Joaquin has dated Anna Flores, who works for a San Antonio technology company. She is 27, taller than her boyfriend, and routinely described as drop-dead gorgeous. Flores isn’t moving to Washington with him, though Joaquin notes that with Congress in session only 126 days next year, he expects to be in Texas more than in D.C. It’s not clear whether a more permanent relationship is in the offing. “You need to decide what you’re going to do,” Julián jokingly prods him.

Their mother elaborates on the brothers’ relationship—and her desire for more grandchildren—over huevos rancheros the next morning at Pico de Gallo, her favorite San Antonio eatery. Rosie took a leave from work to manage Julián’s first, unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 2005—but she’s since returned, running a center that helps students transition to four-year universities. “One of the things I learned long ago is that for campaign managers and staff, it’s often difficult to deal with family,” she says. “I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t be the interfering mother that went over to city hall every day. And you can ask them—I barely ever do.”

How are they different? “They’re both quiet,” she tells me, “but Julián has always been the more quiet, more serious, more of a homebody. Joaquin likes to go out and see and do. He just likes meeting people and trying something new.” What’s more telling is how competitive they used to be. In high school they once played tennis against each other for eight consecutive hours in 100-degree heat—and another time argued so ferociously that their coach had to separate them. At home, they’d fight while watching football. When the Cowboys were losing, it drove Joaquin into a fury he unleashed on his big brother. “And they were always trying to best each other in terms of grades,” their mother remembers. “Now there isn’t any rivalry. They rejoice in each other’s victories—it’s almost like it’s both their victories. Every time Julián has reached some level, Joaquin has been right there with him. And when Joaquin has run or been elected, Julián is right there with him. If there is any competition now, you don’t see it.”

Compare this to the more familiar story of sibling rivalries in politics, such as that of George W. Bush, who supplanted his brother Jeb to run for president in 2000, or Ed Miliband, who ran against his brother, David, for the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party in 2010, and defeated him by a razor margin in the fourth round of voting. What’s surprising about the Castro brothers is the absence of any apparent struggle over precedence. “When we were younger, I think our competition drove us a bit,” Joaquin admits. “But that was transitional to being champions for each other.”

What the Castro brothers commune over is both a policy project and a political project. The policy part revolves around expanding opportunity through education. As Julián declared in his convention speech: “We know that in our free-market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don’t accept is the idea that some folks won’t even get a chance.” After the Texas legislature cut preschool-education funding by more than $200 million, Julián persuaded San Antonio voters to approve an eighth-of-a-cent increase in the local sales tax to fund full-day pre-K for low-income four-year-olds citywide.

Joaquin, who was elected to Congress on the same night that Julián’s pre-K initiative passed, has focused on higher education: how a larger number of underprivileged students can get to college and succeed. He thinks high schools are underserved by overstretched college counselors, and wants to reform the advisory process. One model is the Café College that San Antonio opened in 2010, where students can get SAT prep, advice about where to apply, and assistance with financial aid issues, all in one place. His other idea is to focus on remedial education to help college students stay on track. “A lot of folks are surprised to realize that graduation rates at a lot of our public colleges are lower than our high school graduation rates,” he says. These ideas didn’t go far in Austin, where Republicans dominate the legislature. Joaquin will get another chance to pursue them in the House; newly elected as the president of the freshman Democrats, he’s hoping to develop legislation on the subject.

Their political project is to reverse what Karl Rove accomplished nearly two decades ago, when he solidified the Republican domination of Texas. The brothers have been working with members of Obama’s political team on what they see as a six- to eight-year effort to make Democrats electable again at the state level. Changing demographics and the ideological extremism of the Texas GOP, including its strident opposition to immigration reform, makes this plausible. The biggest obstacle is the one the twins grew up hearing their mother harangue against: the lack of participation by Latinos. Though Hispanics tilt strongly Democratic, they vote much less, with turnout rates that don’t match those of Anglo or African-American voters in the state.

The Castro duo is poised to change that, though a little awkwardly, neither one of them speaks much Spanish. This isn’t uncommon for Mexican-Americans who have lived in Texas for several generations; Rosie, though fluent in Spanish, isn’t quite bilingual either. Joaquin has been listening to tapes sent to him by Eva Longoria, a friend and Texas native. Julián still fantasizes about spending a year in Latin America. “I’ve resolved that before I die, I want to speak it fluently,” he says.

Julián has his sights set on the governor’s mansion, though not in 2014, when Rick Perry might or might not run for reelection. He thinks that’s probably too soon for a Democrat to win statewide. In 2017, however, mayoral term limits will force Julián out of office, which frees him up for a 2018 governor’s race. Joaquin, newly elected to Congress, has to figure out how to make his mark as one of 435. But if he does, the fantasy of many Texas Democrats is an all-Castro ticket: Joaquin challenging the Cuban-American Tea Party darling Ted Cruz for the Senate; his brother running for governor. Beyond that, of course, there is the prediction of the host at Rosario’s, that the first Latino president might be named Castro. Heavy expectations—but for now the brothers wear them lightly. In fact, at the moment, with Joaquin readying his move to D.C., they’re most concerned about living 1,600 miles apart. It’s been fifteen years since they spent even a summer without the other’s company. “I see Joaquin less than I ever have in my life,” Julián tells me—but Joaquin says not to worry. He’s investigated the matter, and there’s a direct flight from Washington Dulles to San Antonio.